In my dream I couldn’t pick those thorns

The Spirit is a Bone is a new exhibition of drawings by Paul Evans based on the various natural history specimens sited at Derby Museum (accompanied by new poems by Chris Jones). Click here for further details about the exhibition (and details of a reading and artist’s talk with Paul Evans and Chris Jones at Derby Museum on Saturday 25 May).

Matthew Clegg visits Sheffield’s Bloc Projects and reflects on a recent exhibition by artist Nigel Grimmer in ‘The Art of Relationship’, which takes in masks, monuments and memoir. Click here to read the essay. Brian Lewis revisits Sheffield’s Graves Gallery (site of a memorable reading given by poet Andrew Hirst in 1998) in ‘Gifts Received’, a new piece for the Longbarrow Blog. Elsewhere, Peter Riley addresses conflict and competitiveness in a review of two new poetry anthologies; click here to read the review (and further contributions to the debate in the ensuing ‘Comments’).

The 2013 Sheffield Poetry Festival takes place over 10 days in early June (31 May – 9 June). The full programme can be found on the new Sheffield Poetry Festival website and includes several events featuring Longbarrow poets (including Angelina Ayers, James Caruth, Matthew Clegg, Rob Hindle, Chris Jones, Fay Musselwhite and Alistair Noon). Click here for details of all 30 events – readings, films, workshops, walks and more…

Paul Evans

On a windy day in February 2011, poet Rob Hindle (and an audience of 30) took a walk through east Sheffield. The walk retraced the journey made by members of Sheffield’s notorious Park Brigade gang following the murder of a soldier in April 1925; a journey also retraced in Hindle’s poem ‘Princess Street to the Wicker’ (featured in the forthcoming Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing), from which he read along the route. The walk is documented in this short film (titled Ganglands):

W S Graham’s elegies for the painters Peter Lanyon and Bryan Wynter are discussed in ‘Dead Letters’, a new essay by Brian Lewis published on the Longbarrow Blog. Click here to read the essay. Further posts by Alistair Noon and Mark Goodwin will appear on the blog during March.

On Saturday 30 March (2pm) artist Paul Evans presents The Song of Meeting and Parting at Sheffield’s Bloc Projects. This special event will take in a poetry walk led by Matthew Clegg and Chris Jones, a ceremony by Becky Bowley, a new painting by Dominic Mason, and a new billboard commission by Evans. Please note that this event is now fully booked.

Our current Featured Poem is Peter Riley‘s ‘Alstonefield 1995′; click here to read the poem (you can also listen to a recording of Riley reading the poem here). Incubator, a collaboration between photographer Karl Hurst and electro artist Nullish, appears here. Finally, we’ve uploaded an excerpt from February’s Outskirts and Outposts event (featuring Matthew Clegg, Mark Goodwin and Chris Jones); listen to the recording here.

We’ve uploaded the third (and final) part of our recent Winter Songs event to SoundCloud (parts 1 & 2 are now deleted). A journey into exile with poets Angelina Ayers, Matthew Clegg, Andrew Hirst, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite (through landscapes haunted by the shades of TS Eliot, Emily Dickinson, Gyorgy Petri and Peter Reading). Click on the podcast below. ‘Listen to it / all night north…’

Poems in order of appearance: Journey of the Magi – TS Eliot (read by Chris Jones); 
St Hilary’s Exile – Angelina Ayers; Welund’s Lament – Andrew Hirst; There’s a certain slant of light… – Emily Dickinson (read by Angelina Ayers); Out Far and In Deep – Matthew Clegg
; Night Song of the Personal Shadow – Gyorgy Petri (read by Andrew Hirst)
; Impasse – Fay Musselwhite; Ovidian – Peter Reading (read by Matthew Clegg).

Finally, we’ve created a short film in response to Kelvin Corcoran‘s remarkable poem ‘Season Below Ground’ (featured in his 2010 Shearsman collection Hotel Shadow). Corcoran’s acclaimed 2011 pamphlet Words Through A Hole Where Once There Was A Chimpanzee’s Face is still available from Longbarrow Press (click here to order)

The themes of winter and exile are taken up in a further audio extract from Andrew Hirst’s Frome poem-cycle; listen to ‘Frome XVI’ below.

We’ve also uploaded a recording of Matthew Clegg’s ’A Letter from Tu Fu’ (from his forthcoming collection West North East), recorded on location in Hillsborough:

Finally, we’ve created a new piece based on the recordings that developed from last year’s Moving with Thought workshop and walk, featuring excerpts from poems by Zoe Walkington, Chris Jones, Emma Bolland, John Barron, Steve Sawyer, Mark Doyle, Mary Marken, Oliver Mantell, Matthew Clegg and Julie Mellor (and the sounds of Parkwood Karting):

We step up onto the shoulder, the cloud disperses, the land retreats before us, walking backwards into private estates…

The Downfall (revisited) comprises two new paintings by Paul Evans and two excerpts from a new work by Peter Riley (The Ascent of Kinder Scout). It is the fifth work to develop from the year’s Seven Wonders collaborations and revisits the site(s) of a notable physical and cultural landmark of the Peak District: Kinder Scout. View The Downfall (revisited) here.

The Seven Wonders series (which continues in 2013) was one of many highlights in a busy year for Longbarrow Press. Here’s a summary of our most memorable events, projects and publications in 2012:
#1  January.  The year begins with two new pamphlets by Alistair Noon. Across the Water crosses and recrosses the rivers, lakes and seas of Central Europe (and further afield); Swamp Area explores the slippery terrain of the modern city-state (post-reunification Berlin). Listen to Noon reading ‘Filling the Triangle’ (on location) here.
#2  April.  The publication of Peter Riley‘s XIV PIECES pamphlet and CD, for which Riley creates a series of home recordings that incorporate the ‘presence’ of the domestic (and several musical offerings) to great effect. Listen to ‘Floating Verse’ here.
#3  May.  The first of several Longbarrow short films is uploaded to our Vimeo site. Over the course of the year, the films range from documentary and performance to dream-like meditations; at the heart of each project is a commitment to craft a response to the poem that is both innovative and sympathetic. View our Vimeo films here.
#4  June.  Artist Paul Evans‘ Seven Wonders project resumes. This series of collaborations between Evans and an expanding cast of poets (in 2012, Angelina Ayers, Mark Goodwin, Fay Musselwhite, Alistair Noon and Peter Riley) yields five new works (based on the natural ‘wonders’ of the Peak District). Visit the Seven Wonders website here.
#5  June.  Matthew Clegg‘s Moving with Thought walk and workshop explores the relationship between walking and poetry – between the body, the mind and the landscape. The workshop participants responded to the invitation with some excellent poems; click here to read them and to access further links to audio recordings of the poems and a short film of the walk.
#6  September.  Inspired by the mystery of bird calls and songs, Call & Response (co-curated by Paul Evans and Brian Lewis) presents 22 new haiku by 10 poets (broadcast via Twitter and SoundCloud) as part of The University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind. Click here to read the haiku.
#7  September.  A Navigation with Matthew Clegg leads an audience of 20 along the Sheffield Canal for a poetry walk that illuminates the culture and history of this quiet, bewitching otherworld. Listen to Clegg reading his poem ‘Attercliffe’ towards the end of the walk here.
#8  October.  Longbarrow Press: Scale, a series of newly commissioned films and performances, takes place at Sheffield’s Bloc Projects. A performance of ‘Scale’ offers a mix of live readings, film and a new performance devised by Becky Bowley and Mark Goodwin; an artist’s talk by Paul Evans illuminates the ideas of ‘scale’ at work in the programme. Click here for more information about the Scale collaborations.
#9  October.  Rob Hindle’s The Purging of Spence Broughton, a Highwayman returns to Hill Top Chapel, Attercliffe, Sheffield with a new cast of supporting readers (Matt Black, James Caruth, Ray Hearne, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite). Click here to read more about Rob Hindle’s (re)telling of the Spence Broughton story.
#10  November.  Our pioneering audio work continues with the podcast of Matthew Clegg‘s new sequence, Cave Time and Sea Changes, based on recordings made by Clegg and Lewis during a visit to a sea cave near Flamborough Head. Clegg’s readings of the poems are punctuated by reflections on the writing of the sequence, memories of earlier visits to the coast, observations on the effects of light within the cave, and the constant presence of the tide ‘as it gulps back / Or sighs forward, swell by swell’. Listen to the podcast here.
#11  November.  closer to ground to hear, a collaborative work by Mark Goodwin (audio poems and texts), Nikki Clayton (photographs) and Brian Lewis (sound design), is installed at Bank Street Arts, Sheffield. A merging of Tarkovsky’s Zone with the rurban rim of north-east Sheffield, the installation is reshaped by Lewis during the residency. Click here to visit the closer to ground to hear site.
#12  December.  The year draws to a close with the publication of Andrew Hirst‘s Hello Dolly, a triptych of long poems exploring (and employing) the strategies of rhetoric and public speech. Listen to Hirst’s uncompromising views on Robert Browning, Patty Hearst and Teddy Kennedy, politics and poetics, and the (mis)management of culture in this candid, compelling podcast.

2013 will see the publication of The Footing, an anthology of specially commissioned poems on the theme of walking, and West North East, the debut full-length collection by Matthew Clegg. Further information about these titles will be posted here in the near future.

…speech fills up

Longbarrow Press is proud to announce the publication of a bold new work by Andrew Hirst (aka photo-grapher Karl Hurst). HELLO DOLLY is a triptych of long poems (‘Tithonus, 1972′, ‘Chappaquiddick, 1980′ and ‘Welund’s Lament’) presented as three individual landscape-format pamphlets with an accompanying 3″ CD of Hirst reading the poems at home in Sheffield. The themes explored in the poems include power (and its decline), public speech, and the failure of rhetoric, obliquely referencing ancient and contemporary myth through the personae of Tithonus (via Tennyson’s poem), Edward Kennedy and Wayland (or Wēland) the Smith. You can listen to Hirst reading ‘Welund’s Lament’ here. To order the three pamphlets and CD (packaged in a handmade, hand-stamped envelope) at the special price of £10 (inc UK p&p), please click here. Listen to Hirst discussing the poems in the podcast below:

Artist Paul Evans‘ collaborative projects continue with a new response to the landscapes of the Peak District created with Berlin-based poet Alistair Noon. The latest addition to the 2012 series of The Seven Wonders focuses on The Burbage Valley, which lies 8km north-west of Sheffield and is largely formed of millstone grit and shale. Evans has created a sequence of six drawings in response to Noon’s poem; the poem and drawings trace a route through the valley towards ‘the developing relicts’. You can read the poem and view the first of these drawings here. A short film comprising all six drawings, the poem and a soundtrack by Brian Lewis can be viewed here. Alistair Noon has also contributed a new essay to the Longbarrow Blog, reporting from (and reflecting on) the wealth redistribution demo that moved through Berlin on 29 September; click here to read ‘Traces of the Middle Ages’.

Becky Bowley, Nikki Clayton and Mark Goodwin reflect on their participation in Longbarrow Press: Scale (a programme of new films, artworks and performance that took place at Sheffield’s Bloc Projects in October) in a new text by Bowley and an edited conversation between Clayton and Goodwin. You can read and listen to their meditations on From the high ground our own Body here. A selection of Nikki Clayton’s photographs for the recent closer to ground to hear installation (which took place at Bank Street Arts in November) can be viewed here; a recording of Goodwin improvising with (and against) his ‘Stalker’ poem (made in the installation space) is available here.

Our current ‘Featured Poem’ is ‘Last Night’ by Fay Musselwhite; you can read the poem here and listen to Musselwhite reading the poem (on location in Walkley, Sheffield) here.

The installation comes at the end of an intensive period of activity for Longbarrow Press, following the recent Scale programme at Bloc Projects and the relaunch of Rob Hindle‘s The Purging of Spence Broughton, a Highwayman. Sheffield’s Hill Top Chapel (built in 1629) was the perfect setting for an evening rich in drama and debate, Hindle and Ray Hearne‘s performance of the sequence (given introductory support by Matt Black, James Caruth, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite) drawing strength from the gloom and chill of the Gothic building. Click here to read Hindle’s reflections on the event; for more information about the Spence Broughton sequence, please click here.

Longbarrow Press: Scale was no less memorable; a series of newly commissioned films and performances taking place over four days, expertly hosted and supported by Sheffield’s Bloc Projects. The focus of the gallery installation was a 40-minute film loop comprising Cells (Paul Evans, Chris Jones), Skin (Karl Hurst, Chris Jones), The 7 Wonders (Angelina Ayers, James Caruth, Paul Evans, Fay Musselwhite), Cortege (Hondartza Fraga, Rob Hindle) and Cave Time and Sea Changes (Matthew Clegg, Karl Hurst). The closing event offered a mix of live readings, film and a new performance devised by Becky Bowley and Mark Goodwin; an artist’s talk by Paul Evans illuminated the ideas of ‘scale’ at work in the exhibition. The Scale website will remain an active resource for the audio and film works, essays and project reflections; new material will be posted to the site in the coming weeks. Here’s one of the short films:

Matthew Clegg‘s new sequence, Cave Time and Sea Changes, was presented at Bloc Projects as a 20-minute film (with images by Karl Hurst); Brian Lewis has also produced a 30-minute audio podcast of the work based on recordings made by Clegg and Lewis during a visit to a sea cave on the North Landing of Flamborough Head in September 2012. Clegg’s readings of the poems are punctuated by reflections on the writing of the sequence, memories of earlier visits to the coast, observations on the effects of light within the cave, and the constant presence of the tide ‘as it gulps back / Or sighs forward, swell by swell’. Listen to the podcast here.

Also among the new works previewed in the Scale programme was ‘Peak Cavern’, a new poem by Angelina Ayers accompanied by a new painting by Paul Evans (part of The Seven Wonders, an ongoing series of collaborative works). Click here to view the painting and the poem. We’ve also uploaded a new recording of Ayers reading her poem ‘Aseptic Technique’ in the lift area on the third floor of the Royal Hallamshire Hospital, Sheffield; you can listen to the recording here.

Poet and photographer Karl Hurst (aka Andrew Hirst) has set up a new blog for his writings on visual culture. The first post, ‘Out on the end of an event’, discusses the relationship(s) between photography and banality (and more besides): click here to read the essay (illustrated with images from Hurst’s ‘Up Against a Brick Wall’ series and photographs by Roger Fenton, Paul Graham and Richard Prince). And finally… Order any Longbarrow Press title during November 2012 and you will receive a free postcard (curated by the artist Paul Evans: a photograph by Karl Hurst and a new, exclusive poem by Chris Jones).

October will also see the relaunch of Rob Hindle‘s acclaimed dramatic sequence The Purging of Spence Broughton, a Highwayman. Hindle (with guest readers James Caruth, Ray Hearne, Chris Jones and Fay Musselwhite) will perform the work in the unique setting of Hill Top Chapel, Attercliffe, Sheffield at 6.30pm on Sunday 28 October. Links to poems, essays and recordings can be found on our new Spence Broughton website; for booking information and detailed directions to the Hill Top Chapel performance, please click here.

Our Call & Response haiku series (comprising 22 bird-themed poems broadcast on Twitter and SoundCloud in late September) is now available as an eight-minute suite on SoundCloud featuring the recordings of the haiku in their original broadcast sequence. Click here to listen to the poets reading all 22 haiku in locations ranging from Creswell Crags to the suburbs of Sheffield.

We’ve also uploaded an excerpt from A Navigation with Matthew Clegg, which found the poet walking with and reading to an audience of 20 along the towpath of the Sheffield Canal on 23 September. Click here to listen to Clegg introducing and reading the poem ‘Attercliffe’ (in the shadow of Attercliffe bridge) and here for field recordings of the canal basin.